Speaking Evil

by Jason Parent

  “I said, drop it, and make him stop.” Sam stepped forward, her gun still leveled at a spot between Dr. Horvat’s eyes. “Now!”

  “I-it’s good to see you again, Michael,” the stranger said in a shaky voice.

  Michael had nearly forgotten about her, his focus on the standoff and Jimmy’s limp frame in the agent’s arms. He turned to face Tessa, his heart jumping with elation despite the heartache around it, then plummeting into despair as he took in her ashen face and bloodied shirt. A gun clattered at his feet, but Michael hardly noticed it. “Tessa! How? What are you and Jimmy doing here?”

  “Are we still in Brentworth? I feel... dizzy.” A smile flickered across her lips as she reached up with a bloody finger to touch his face. “I... missed... you.”

  Michael flinched back from the touch. Every word seemed a struggle for Tessa, each much lower than the one before it. Tessa’s eyes rolled back. She fell to the floor.

  “Shit!” Sam said, making it to Tessa’s side almost as quickly as Michael had. “Apply pressure to the wound. Both hands!” Sam’s fingers searched Tessa’s neck for a pulse, her other hand still aiming the gun at Dr. Horvat.

  With Sam’s attention divided, the doctor made for the door. Sam fired. The bullet exploded the wood in the wall beside the exit. Sam bolted after her, stopping the door from swinging shut and locking them in.

  But Sam didn’t continue after her. She turned and roared. “Fuck! Tend to her while I help Jimmy.”

  “Why are they here?” Michael whined. He looked at the open door, seeing an escape from the madness around him, wanting at that moment to be anywhere but there. Sam would get them out, would keep them safe. She had to. Even as two of his only friends died around him. “Why is this happening?”

  “Michael, you need to help Tessa. Now!”

  The sharpness in Sam’s voice incited purpose. Michael sniffled and searched Tessa’s top for the entry hole, but so much blood had soaked it that he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Her chest no longer rose and fell, but a slight hiss between her lips kept him hopeful. He yanked up her shirt and found blood bubbling from a dark patch just over her left breast. Placing both hands over it, one overlapping the other, he pressed down hard.

  “Don’t die, Tessa.” His eyes blurred. “Please don’t die.”

  He heard a thump, then Sam shouted. “Shit! He’s not breathing. Shit! Shit! Shit!” A thump on the floor came with every word. “Beginning CPR. How you doing over there, Michael?”

  Michael blinked. He watched his tears fall against Tessa’s bloodied chest. “Not good.” His nose ran, and he sniffled. “Not good.”

  “Just... keep applying pressure. The Fed is out cold, but if he’s who he says he is, I’m sure help is on the way. Hold on, Michael.”

  Even while pumping Jimmy’s chest in a cadence that seemed to match the pounding of the heartbeat in his head, Michael could see through the lie in her words. He leaned forward, hovering his wet cheek a fraction of an inch over Tessa’s mouth. The faint hiss of air was gone.

  A sob escaped him. Wails tightened up his chest and suffocated him. The blood smearing his hands was cooling, congealing. Tessa’s body under it was still. His friend—no, she was so much more than that—someone with whom he’d shared a bond of loneliness, of freakishness, of kinship, and maybe even of love—was gone.

  And it was all his fault.

  CHAPTER 29

  Jimmy gulped in air as he sat up, the splintering pain in his sides as his lungs expanded a terrible reminder that he was still alive. He took in his surroundings, everything coming back to him quickly. Detective Reilly crouched beside him.

  “Agent Pike!” he sputtered. God, how it hurt to talk.

  “Easy,” the detective said, her face contorted with what looked like genuine concern. She pointed to her right. “He’s over there.”

  Jimmy’s eyes widened as he saw Agent Pike lying prone and not moving. “You didn’t—”

  “No. He’s just unconscious. Whacked him pretty good with his Glock, so his head’s going to be ringing something awful when he wakes. But listen, if you’re okay, I need—”

  “That jerk! I told him—” Jimmy groaned and blinked, his head still a little fuzzy. Pressing his knuckle into his forehead and making small circles. “He should’ve just given me the gun. Asshole tried to kill me!”

  Detective Reilly snapped her fingers. “Jimmy? Are you listen—”

  “Phone! I had a phone!” He scrambled to his feet and began looking for the bag he’d brought in with him. Detective Reilly gave him a confused, maybe annoyed, look, but he paid her no mind.

  Scanning the room for the plastic bag he’d been carrying, he spotted Michael crying and squatting over a limp form. His breath hitched. “Mikey?” A chill ran through him. “Is that... Tessa?”

  Hands grabbed his shoulders and spun him back around. Detective Reilly’s pained expression communicated the gravity of the crap he’d awoken to, her soft, almost sickly look casting a vibe through Jimmy that rattled his nerve. “If we don’t do something soon, she’ll die. You said something about a phone?”

  Jimmy tried to focus. She looks like she’s dead already. He started to turn, but the detective shook him. Stern eyes met him as he faced forward again.

  “The phone, Jimmy. We need that phone!”

  “I-I-I must have dropped it when the Bandage Man, er, Agent Pike grabbed me.” He took in the room again then ran to the doorway where he found the plastic bag. Inside was the burner phone and Agent Pike’s badge, which was apparently jostled out of his arm and knocked over there during the melee. He muttered a thank you to the Almighty as he bent to pick it up, grateful neither the doctor nor that crazy killer had seen the bag while retreating.

  Wasting no more time, he ripped open the bag and powered on the phone. He dialed the one number he found programmed into it, and as it rang, he hurried back into the room.

  “Matthew?” Agent Spinney spat after one ring. “What’s your status?”

  “Uh... Agent Spinney, right? This is Jimmy. We—”

  Detective Reilly stole the phone from his hand. “Frank? Is that you?” After a split second, her shoulders dropped a little away from her ears. Even then, she looked wound up tighter than a lug nut. “Oh, thank God. He’s okay. We’re okay. But listen—”

  Detective Reilly winced then frowned. “Your agent? The fucking guy tried to kill us. But, Frank—”

  The detective huffed as Agent Spinney apparently interrupted her a second time. “Brainwashed?” The word came out of her mouth as if it were the stupidest thing anyone had ever said to her. She paused a half a second, breathed, then said, “Okay. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. We need a bus stat! Civilian down. Plus—” She stomped her foot. “I know we’re at a hospital, but those lunatics are still here somewhere if they haven’t already made their escape, and who knows how many other brainwashed people they’ve got here to do their bidding? So get off your ass. Get us hospital staff you can trust, lock down this place and the entire damn city, and do all of that right fucking now!”

  She cocked her head, scowling as she listened, then handed the phone to Jimmy. “Here. Tell him how to get to us.”

  Jimmy placed the phone against his ear and did his best to explain to Agent Spinney the circuitous route that would lead the cavalry through the rec room and into an unused portion of the hospital to the dungeon of a room where he stood.

  Jimmy held the phone loosely by his side and turned to Sam. “He put me on hold.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. Shouting came from somewhere far off inside the hospital.

  “What’s all that screaming?” he asked.

  The detective, Michael, and Jimmy searched the walls as if the voices came from somewhere within them. No one said a word.

  “Jimmy!” Frank’s voice bellowed through the phone’s speaker, and Jimmy pressed the phone back to his ear. “You have to get out of there. They’re all out. All the most violent offenders from Ward D. It’s a madhouse in th
ere.”

  “Shit!” Jimmy spat. He looked at the detective then Michael. Both gazed at him, expressions expectant as if he might be able to give them good news, some hope, or at least a false promise that help was on its way. He looked down. Instead, he could only tell them that things had gone from bad to worse.

  “They’re killing staff and other patients alike,” Frank said. “Get out of there! Get out now!”

  The line went dead. He could see in Michael and Detective Reilly’s wide eyes and bloodless cheeks that they’d just heard every word and felt a modicum of relief at not having to be the one to tell them. He waggled the phone at Tessa. “We can’t just leave her.”

  Detective Reilly took a step toward him. “We have to. Jimmy, she’s already—”

  “I’ll carry her.” Agent Pike was on his feet, surprising them all. Jimmy nearly dropped the phone as he jumped.

  All eyes were on the agent as he walked over to Tessa and crouched near her limp form. With the gentleness of a loving father, he scooped her into his arms and stood. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “We need to get a move on before someone finds us.” Agent Pike nodded at the gun in Sam’s hand. His gun. “Sam, you take point. I’ll guard the rear.”

  Sam didn’t trust the stranger and supposed FBI agent who’d just tried to kill Jimmy to watch her back. A little voice inside her head, growing louder, screamed at her to shoot the man for whom he pretended to be. It couldn’t be, shouldn’t be him. Not after all those years of silence, of letting her believe he was dead. A betrayal like no other. How can I trust him now?

  She put it out of her mind, tending to what needed to be done, but she couldn’t keep the nagging question at bay any longer. Her voice quivering, she asked what her heart had already answered but what her stubborn brain refused to accept. “Why did he call you Bruce?”

  “You know why, Sam,” the agent said, his voice quiet, filled with shame. “When we get out of here, we’ll have a lot to talk about. But first, we need to get these children to safety.”

  Sam bit her lip, but she nodded. Slowly, she crept to the door, the pistol by her side pointed at the floor. Michael followed behind her, then Jimmy, then the agent—no, then Bruce—carrying Tessa’s dead weight. Sam’s heart went out for the girl, but it was too late for her. And by the sounds of screaming and mayhem happening in the direction they were headed, she could use another able-bodied person at her side, not one encumbered by the fiction of hope.

  They exited the room into darkness. The corridor outside was like an abandoned subway tunnel, cool and desolate. Despite having a fixed beginning and no offshoots that she could tell, it was unnavigable in its utter blackness. One of the boys trotted up beside her, lightly brushing against her elbow.

  “It’s this way,” Jimmy said. “Just follow the wall. There are a few steps up to a door at the end of the corridor. There should be light on the other side.”

  They walked the hall as quickly as caution would allow. Banshee wails echoed around them as if they were at the bottom of a well, making it impossible for Sam to determine which direction they were coming from. A bang sounded ahead of her, and she reached out for Jimmy, her heart skipping when she couldn’t find him.

  He grunted. “Found the stairs.”

  The squeak of a turning doorknob and the creak of a door hinge brought light flooding into Sam’s eyes. When her vision adjusted, she saw another mostly empty hallway with a few cardboard boxes stacked along the right wall. This corridor, though, had many offshoots and rooms to boot.

  She tugged on the back of Jimmy’s shirt, pulling him behind her. “Which way?”

  Jimmy pointed. “Second left. That hallway should lead to the rec area inside the prerelease ward. From there, I’m not a hundred percent sure how to get out. But I can get us to the visitation area. Patients come from one direction while the visitors always come from the other, so...”

  Sam nodded. It was as good a plan as any. If they passed by the offices where she’d met Dr. Horvat earlier, she could get them out from there. But having spent most of the last twelve hours drugged out of her mind, she couldn’t even venture a guess as to where the psychopath and his deranged girlfriend had deposited her and Michael. Resuming point and keeping her weapon at the ready, she stalked down the hall past sparsely decorated rooms with separating curtains and rusted gurneys. Anyone could have been hiding behind those curtains or in hidden corners. She halted and listened.

  A shriek came from somewhere up ahead, muffled by plaster and partitions. Unfortunately, it seemed to come from the very direction they were heading. To her right, a shadow shrank into a room.

  She aimed her gun at the doorway. “Police. Show yourself!”

  A giant hand, raised in surrender, emerged from around the wall. A massive frame of pure muscle in scrubs and the unfamiliar face of a dark-skinned young man appeared. Pinned to his chest was a nametag that read Curtis. “Don’t shoot! We’re unarmed!”

  “We?” Sam held up her hand for the man to stop moving. “Who’s in there with you?”

  “A few of the patients—Manny, Terry, and Harriet. Good people. Please, help us. The place is overrun, inmates from Ward D killing everyone they see. How they all got out is beyond me. It’s a bloodbath out there. We were in the rec room when we were attacked. One of them had a scalpel and started slitting throats.”

  “How’d you escape?” Sam kept her gun trained on the orderly. She’d already been betrayed by one Curtis.

  “The staff-only door. You need a badge to get in through here, so those psychos couldn’t follow us. They only stopped pounding on the door a few minutes ago. Hopefully, they’ve given up. The screams don’t seem as close anymore.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Step out slowly, all of you, and line up against the wall.”

  A woman in her seventies with knobby, arthritic fingers but a shrewdness in her eyes followed in the wake of the hulking Curtis. Behind her came a pudgy middle-aged gentleman whose shirt was a little too short and tight to cover the hairy spare tire hanging over his waistline. Finally, another man with a full head of thick gray curls came staggering out, face as white as clean linens. His neck was wrapped in medical tape, a dark-red stain blotting a compress under it.

  “Manny took a pretty good slice in the melee,” Curtis said as he nodded toward the last man’s injury. “I did what I could for him. I’m just an orderly, but I’m going to nursing school, so I’ve had some training.”

  “Really?” Jimmy stepped between Sam’s gun and Curtis and tugged at the orderly’s sleeve. When the man didn’t budge, Jimmy pointed at Tessa and said, “You’ve got to help her!”

  “Jimmy, can you vouch for these people?” Sam had almost asked for Bruce’s opinion, but that would have meant acknowledging her late partner’s continued and inexplicable existence. She wasn’t ready for that.

  “Yes. Portuguese Guy, Chess Lady, and, uh, Dirty Terry. They’re all fine, I think. Who knows who’s been brainwashed in this place.”

  “What about him?” She waved her gun at Curtis.

  “If he helped all these people, I’m guessing he’s okay.” Jimmy dismissed Sam, again tugging at Curtis. “Can you help her? Please?”

  Sam nodded, and Curtis slowly let his arms fall. He walked over to the girl cradled in her formerly dead partner’s arms. He froze when he noticed who was holding her, then cocked back his fist. “I oughtta kill you for—”

  “Enough!” Sam shouted.

  The orderly shook his head and let out a breath, then he examined Tessa.

  Bruce straightened. “I’m a federal agent. Undercover. Sorry about earlier. Like the boy said, it’s hard to know who we can trust in here.”

  Curtis looked around incredulously, but when no one disputed the man’s claims, he just shook his head. “This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  He put two fingers against Tessa’s wrist. “I’m not getting a... Wait. It’s there, but it’s faint.” He hurried back into
the room. “Bring her in here quickly.”

  Bruce carried Tessa into the room and laid her upon a dusty old gurney. It squealed beneath her weight.

  Curtis shuffled about the room. “There’s little I can do for her except maybe stop the bleeding.” Whatever he’d grabbed to fix up the one called Manny, he carried over to Tessa. Without hesitation, he ripped open her shirt and doused the wound with what appeared to be hydrogen peroxide. Sam bet it would have hurt like hell, but Tessa didn’t budge. Sam didn’t have much hope she’d survive. And the longer they stayed there, the longer the rest of them remained in danger.

  “She was shot?” Curtis’s eyes searched each of them in turn for an answer.

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  Curtis lifted Tessa’s shoulder. “I don’t see an exit wound. I can clean and stitch her up and stop the bleeding, but the bullet will still be inside her. She will need it removed and probably several blood transfusions if she’s to have any chance at survival. We need to get her to the ER ASAP.”

  Without another word, Curtis hastily went about caring for the wound as best he could with the few tools he had to work with. When he was done, Tessa appeared just as lifeless as she did before he’d started, her chest falling and rising almost imperceptibly.

  “Spinney!” Jimmy shouted into the cell phone. “Are there ambulances outside?” Jimmy began to pace. “Okay. Got it. We’ll find a way.” He hung up the phone.

  “He says the doors are barricaded. Everyone who could be evacuated has been, but doctors are on standby. The police have the building surrounded and are rounding up most of the residents who tried to flee. But several patients still inside have blocked the entrances and taken hostages. They can’t barge in without risking innocent lives.”

  “So, we find our own way out?” For the first time, Sam looked Bruce in those glossy blue eyes she knew so very well.

  He met her stare. “Looks that way.”